31 March 2017 12:01 PM

A couple of days ago I responded on Twitter to a Camille Araz, in a brief discussion on why I hoped that customary measures would be restored in this country once we had left the EU(I am by no means sure that they will be, by the way).

Mr Araz had said ‘I have never been taught about yards, feet and inches, but I will try my best to learn!

I replied: ‘Useful in USA. We went to the moon in miles, yards, feet and inches. Europe liberated in these measures. Death camp fences measured in metres’.

It’s actually something I have said many times before, and will say again, as long as I live. It’s intended to stimulate thought in the intelligent. What I mean by it is quite simple.

The continued use of customary measures is no barrier to scientific or technical advance. Indeed, Victorian Britain and the 20th century USA, hitherto the world’s most successful scientific, industrial and economic powers, both used customary measurements at the height of their success. When you think about it, there is absolutely no reason why customary measurements should be a barrier to engineering and other activities. Many who work in wood or cloth find the existence of intermediate units such as inches and feet, helpful in their calculations. Schools in metricated countries use rulers which are 30 cm long, not in any way a Metric unit, but almost exactly equivalent to a customary foot. Russian market traders sell meat not by the kilogram but by the ‘polkilo’, ‘half-kilo’, close to a customary pound. The legal persecution of market traders in Britain who wanted to use customary measures has led not to use of metric measures, but to the sale of fruit and vegetables by the ‘bowl’, a quantity which the customer can at least see before he or she buys it. Nobody understands what the metric measures mean in practice, so we have gone back to guesswork.

Customary measures are just as capable of being used precisely as are metric ones. They are also much easier to visualise when swift decisions must be made. There is rather moving film of the final descent to the Moon’s surface of the Lunar Module ‘Eagle’. The astronauts can be heard recording the module’s height above the moon…in feet. I have been led to believe that the engineering of the rockets was also done in customary measures, but would be grateful for information on this.

The metric system is a feature of Utopian totalitarian regimes, such as the two which ran death camps in the 20th century, Stalin’s Communist and class-prejudiced USSR and Hitler’s National Socialist and racialist Third Reich. Of course it’s more complicated than that. It always is. But the metric system was introduced into the world in 1799, by the Directory, the last gasp of the blood-bespattered Jacobin revolution before it became a more straightforward and less ideological dictatorship under Bonaparte. This was the revolution which decimalised money and time, abolished the old local boundaries and provinces of France, murdered the monarch, desecrated the Churches, murdered many thousands of its opponents after kangaroo trials, or no trials at all, sometimes by beheading in public, sometimes by mass drownings, introduced a new calendar and imagined it had begun the world over again. It was the model for the 1871 Paris Commune and for the Russian Bolsheviks, also Utopian fanatics. The Utopian Marquis de Condorcet ( arrested by the Revolutionaries and ‘found dead in his cell’ soon afterwards. At least he wasn’t ‘shot while trying to escape’ ) pronounced that it was to be ‘for all people and for all time’ . He had been a ‘moderate’, who thought Louis XVI should be sent to the galleys as a slave, rather than publicly murdered. Similarly, the Bolsheviks imposed the metric system on Russia, in 1924, in intervals between murdering their opponents, opening the first Gulag camps, robbing churches, destroying the economy and fighting a civil war. Yet they were not too busy to do this thing, which appeals to all revolutionaries.

The French loathed the new system and by 1812 they had virtually given it up. It wasn’t reimposed on them till 1837, and in my experience is still resisted there in several interesting ways. Buy butter from a Normandy framer, and he will sell you a ‘livre’. Buy draught beer in a French café and it will come in a ‘demi’, which is not a half-litre, but much closer to a half pint. So why a ‘demi?’ And no metric fanatic has ever explained to me why no decent French(or Italian, or Spanish, or German) wine is ever sold in a litre bottle. It used to come in 72 or 73 centilitre bottles, which were obviously based on some pre-metric standard( actually equivalent to an old English measure called, amusingly, a ‘bottle’).

Of course, there are other countries where the metric system has been imposed peacefully rather than by revolution or despotism or invasion. The big exceptions are Apartheid South Africa, whose nationalists adopted decimal republican currency and the metric system to emphasise their rejection of the British Crown and Commonwealth, Australia and New Zeraland, which , in adoping the dollar and the metre sought to assert their independence from a ‘mother country’, which had left them down pretty badly in World War two. And Canada, which by adopting the metric system under Pierre Trudeau simultaneously emphasised its freedom from British influence, its bilingual European-ness and its separation from the customary USA. Yet you can still by 14-‘once’ steaks in French speaking Quebec, where the heights of arches are often still shown in ‘pieds’ and ‘pouces’.

But until much of the Anglosphere broke away , and until Britain(without ever considering the matter at an election or in Parliament) began to ditch customary measures, there had been a general congruence between Common law countries with jury trial and Bills of Rights, and customary measures. Civil code countries, with power-worshipping Roman la\w and the practical presumption of guilt, tend also be metric.

I don’t think this is accidental. I think a country is either top down or bottom up. Utopian, cold, arid, tediously regular metric systems, based on idealism, are top-down. Quirky, flexible, poetic customary measures, with their ancient friendly names, are bottom up. One has grown like a fort. The other has been plonked down like a housing estate. I began to consider the subject when I realised that I felt an actual pain of loss over the wiping out of customary measures in my homeland, especially the spiteful prosecution and conviction of the greengrocer Steve Thoburn for selling bananas by the pound to customers who preferred this, still not quashed .

I sought to explain it and found the reason in the arguments above. People are always telling me how trivial it is, yet it is striking that any defence of customary measures(my sole aim) is met by a storm of petulant and snobbish rage from metric fanatics. My latest encounter with these zealots on Twitter has even led to a snide paragraph about me in The Times today. I explain in vain that I am quite happy to use the metric system and have it alongside the customary measures I prefer. I simply object to any attempt to stamp out customary measures. But they, like all zealots, think I am like them.

It is the same thing as monarchy, really. It just happens to be the case that almost all the longest-lasting free, law-governed countries in the world are constitutional monarchies (the main exception is the USA, which is an elective* constitutional monarchy, with disadvantages we now see). Such states are far less likely to have torture chambers, secret police and arbitrary arrest than are ‘republics’, a category which includes North Korea, apartheid south Africa and East Germany.

My short tweet was intended to stimulate thought among the intelligent. Alas, it provoked rage among, well, other people. But this is always the way, Many people just don’t like thought.

Share this article:

21 April 2016 5:19 PM

Here is an illustration of the gulf between today and yesterday which makes life increasingly melancholy and odd for people such as me, of whom there are still quite a few.

At 8.24 this morning on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4, the presenter, John Humphrys, did a very rare thing. He made an on-air correction. I assume this followed a stream of stinging complaints from listeners of a certain age.

Why?

One of the Corporation’s Royal correspondents, Peter Hunt, had reminisced on air that the Queen had been born in far-off days when ‘a pint of milk cost one pence’.

Now, either this will pass you by or it will infuriate you. To anyone of my generation, it is like hearing someone say . “There was only one geese on the pond’ or ‘My mum gave me a sugar mice’. That is to say, it might be pardonable in a three-year-old, but in an educated adult it is an astonishing failure to grasp the rules of the English language. The words ‘one’ and ‘pence’ cannot be put in the same phrase without short-circuiting the language , causing a loud bang, a bright flash and clouds of smoke in any sentences nearby. Stretcher-bearers would normally need to be called. But in this case it is worse because it is hopelessly entangled with the rusty barbed wire of national culture.

Proper British people used to use something called money, quite different from the magnetic tokens and unconvincing scraps of paper which now pass for this thing. The coins that clanked in our pockets were mainly things called pennies, large bronze discs a bit more than an inch across, which banks weighed rather than counted (because there was an exact relation between weight and value, three pennies to an ounce, I think), which their scales were calibrated to note. They’re still used to weight the mechanism in the great clock of Big Ben. They had Britannia staring out to sea on one side, one hand resting on a shield bearing the Union Jack, the other holding a trident (the three-pronged fish spear, not the nuclear missile) . On the other side the monarch’s head, or rather *a* monarch’s head. The oldest I ever received in change was dated 1868, polished almost smooth, though many (‘Bun Pennies’) still had the beautiful portrait of the young Queen Victoria with her hair in a bun, later replaced by the gloomy old veiled widow. Every handful of change was a history lesson, and a bit of a Latin lesson too, because the penny featured so much more of the royal title (in that language, but abbreviated) than modern coins do. Edward VII was common, George V even more so, George VI and the young Elizabeth not even worth a glance. Farthings had just been abolished when I began to get weekly pocket money, as had the silver threepence, but the half-penny, universally known as a ‘ha’penny (pronounced ‘haypenny’) was still very much in use

The unBritish-looking decimal ‘pennies’ and half-pennies which were introduced in 1971 never achieved familiarity or popularity. The half pennies stuck to your fingertip, slipped into cracks and were more or less useless for anything except as emergency screwdrivers.

And people couldn’t bring themselves to call them pennies or ha'pennies. The transition from one system of money, the old, intelligent, handsome British one to the new dimwit, ugly global one immediately obliterated the penny, ha’penny, threepenny bit and half-crown. But some of our old friends survived – the sixpence, the shilling and the florin, re-designated as two and half pence, five pence and ten pence. All these have now been withdrawn and no trace remains of the coinage we once had as a free and independent nation.

But the new penny was an anomalous interloper. I think the problem lay in the fact that the new penny’s value bore no relation to that of the old penny – it was supposedly worth more but was smaller and seemed to buy less. And that what was actually a cent was called a ‘penny’ because the government knew that calling it a ‘cent’ would make people feel (as well they might have done) that they had quietly been occupied by some foreign power and had lost their country. It’s an amusing paradox that Americans call their cents ‘pennies’ out of ancient habit. But we couldn’t bring ourselves to call these trivial, unlovely things ‘pennies’.

So they were either referred to rather scornfully as ‘pee’, ‘new pee’ or, strangely as ‘pence’ in the singular. I first came across this on Clydeside in the summer of 1971 where I was working as a Trotskyist agitator on the fringes of the Upper Clyde Shipbuilders ‘work-in’ protest against the yard closures there. I and others were trying to sell great reams of special issues of the ‘Socialist Worker’ to the workers, priced at one new penny. An enterprising urchin offered to take a bundle of them and sell them for us, and I was astonished to hear him brightly calling out to the passing proletarians ‘One pence for a paper!’. He did better than we did.

It was the first time I’d heard this odd formula, and it puzzled me then and for some time afterwards. Now I think I understand it. But in fact Mr Hunt had it wrong. A pint of milk in 1926 cost a penny a pint, not 2.4 pennies or one new pee. . Now it costs more than seven shillings and ought to cost a good deal more if the supermarkets weren't squeezing the dairy farmers so hard. And if you know that fact and remember what a shilling once was, you understand what has happened to our national wealth and to our society.

Share this article:

23 March 2015 2:49 PM

I’m always intrigued by the rather spiteful mockery which follows any suggestion that decimal currency may not, in fact, be the ideal or only possible sort of currency. I’ve never been sure that a counting system based on the number of toes we all have is so fantastically superior, and so obviously more modern than the far more sophisticated system of shillings and pence which existed until I was 20 years old, during an era when the finances of this country were rather better run, at state and individual level, than they are now.

These jeers often include witless jibes about ‘ bringing back the groat’, which were also common during the equally stupid ‘progressive’ campaign to introduce the Euro. I have no idea what a groat was, and couldn’t care less, nor is it relevant to either discussion. There’s nothing specially modern or ‘progressive' about decimal systems. They’re simpler than the alternative, but so are the strip system of cultivation, architecture without arches, engines without gears, wattle and daub, septic tanks and cooking over an open fire. In fact, the earliest major country to decimalise its coinage was that heart of black reaction, superstition, autocracy and backwardness, Tsarist Russia, in 1704. The French revolutionaries associated the idea with 'progress’ but only because one of their main desires was to smash all bridges to the past.

They even tried to decimalise the calendar, but had to give this up when the universe, and suffering humanity which likes a rest more often than every ten days, refused to adapt themselves to their toe-counting ten-day weeks and ten-month years .Ten-week months were too ludicrous even for the Jacobins, as was the cubic metre, or stere, as a liquid measure. This was far too huge to be of any practical use. The current ‘litre’ is a cubic decimetre, like the centimetre a non-standard use of the metric system, employed to get over the fact that it is so cumbersome and inhuman. Even then, no decent French wine is sold by the litre, 200 years after its introduction in that country. Until recently, French wine bottles were sold by the wholly irregular measure of 72 centilitres, more or less exactly equivalent to that fine old English wine measure, the ‘bottle’. Now they’ve been rounded up to 75 centilitres. But they still haven't been forced to conform to a system that is based on ideals rather than on life.

The interesting thing (to me) is the inability of so many people to imagine any kind of world different to the one we now live in; and the equally great difficulty many people have in believing that any former system could be superior to what we now have, or that anything at all in the past was better than what we have in the present.

This attitude of shut-minded mockery is well summed up in the episode in ‘Nineteen Eighty Four’ where Winston Smith, on an illicit walk through the poorer parts of IngSoc London, visits a proletarian pub, and witnesses this exchange: ‘‘I arst you civil enough, didn’t I?’ said the old man, straightening his shoulders pugnaciously. ‘You telling me you ain’t got a pint mug in the ’ole bleeding boozer?’

‘And what in hell’s name IS a pint?’ said the barman, leaning forward with the tips of his fingers on the counter.

‘‘Ark at ’im! Calls ’isself a barman and don’t know what a pint is! Why, a pint’s the ’alf of a quart, and there’s four quarts to the gallon. ‘Ave to teach you the A, B, C next.’

‘Never heard of ’em,’ said the barman shortly. ‘Litre and half litre — that’s all we serve. There’s the glasses on the shelf in front of you.’

‘I likes a pint,’ persisted the old man. ‘You could ’a drawed me off a pint easy enough. We didn’t ’ave these bleeding litres when I was a young man.’

‘When you were a young man we were all living in the treetops,’ said the barman, with a glance at the other customers.’

The author of this passage, George Orwell, famously noted that one of the first things that you noticed when you came home from the continent was that ‘the beer is bitterer and the coins are heavier’. He knew these things mattered not just for themselves, but because they represented something else that was different about this country, its ancient, polished-in-use institutions, laws, customs, made by and for its people, not imposed on them by neat-minded rulers.

When we hear people sneering about this subject, we observe two interesting and not very creditable forces at work. One, a shut mind that refuses to think; the other a prejudice against the past which prevents any lessons being learned from it. Groats, indeed.

I have long thought that the old British currency was destroyed for two reasons, both foreseen by Jim Callaghan (then Chancellor of the Exchequer) when he made the announcement that decimalisation would proceed, in the midst of a pre-election mini-budget on 1st March 1966. The first was that he anticipated the severe inflation which was about to burst on the British economy, and which would be to some extent disguised by a new currency whose smallest unit was almost two-and-a-half times the size of the existing smallest unit (in 1966 any typewriter keyboard would have had keys for fractions, which have now completely disappeared. I am not sure if early computer keyboards in fact contained them. An interesting unnoticed change). The second was that the establishment had made up their minds to join what was then the Common Market, where a single currency was already foreseen, and a decimal pound would be more easily merged with it. I believe, but cannot find the reference, that our Common Market 'partners' placed actual pressure on British governments to take this step.

The prejudicial establishment of a committee which was not even allowed to discuss the issue of whether decimalisation would be good or bad, came at a time when the establishment was all but pleading to be allowed into the supposedly glorious Common Market.

As far as I know ( I have not been able to obtain a copy) , the September 23 1963 Halsbury Committee which investigated the introduction of Decimal Currency into Britain (Report of the Committee of Inquiry on Decimal Currency) was specifically not asked to discuss the issue of *whether* Britain should have a decimal currency, only to look into ways by which it could be done.

As with metrication, there does not ever seem to have been any actual Bill before Parliament on the matter. It was just done. The committee was divided between those who thought the pound should be retained, for reasons of national prestige, and those who thought we should follow several Commonwealth countries, and base the new unit on ten shillings, as half a pound was in those days. There was also a problem about what we could call the new, smaller currency. ‘Dollar’ (though chosen by Australia and New Zealand) would be too obvious a surrender. But if we called it a ‘pound’ people would think it was a form of devaluation.

Certainly nobody did anything about it at the time. Gordon Greig, of the Daily Mail, reported ‘Sir Miles Thomas, the industrialist’ had asked ‘Would someone tell me what benefit Britain will achieve by this hysterical plunge towards continental standards? Surely we can use £100 million in ways better than confusing ourselves and our export customers by changing to a decimal system?’.

Nor did Callaghan seem to be in a hurry, when he announced the change on 1st March 1966. The implementation of the decision (which cost about £4 billion at today’s prices) was to be in five years, in 1971 (by which time Mr Callaghan would be in opposition) . In any case it was overshadowed by a new betting tax and the usual pre-election gimmicks of help for poorer mortgage-holders and attractive new ways of saving.

And so it just went, as things do in a world where everyone is either seduced by the new or unwilling to fight for the old.

The old system was better in practice because it was immensely more flexible. It was divisible by three into whole numbers and exact sums, which decimal systems are not. The different values represented by pounds, shillings and pence were appropriate to the things they were used to buy – pennies for sweets, milk or a newspaper, shillings for books or bacon, pounds for the bigger, more permanent things (something similar is true of inches, feet and miles, of ounces, pounds , stones, hundredweights and tons). Nobody who was brought up with it ever had any problem with it . You just had to learn your times tables in those authoritarian schools we used to have. I get short-changed (and, more worryingly, long-changed) much more often now than I did when we still had proper money.

Prices went up more slowly, and it was more noticeable when they did.

I *liked* the old coins for all those reasons. But I *loved* them because they were full of history – a pocketful of change would contain portraits of Queen Victoria, both as a young woman and an old veiled widow, some of them polished almost smooth, some miraculously unworn, Edward VII, George V, George VI, and our present Queen. The older silver coins, which really contained quite a lot of silver, shone when you rubbed them on your sleeve.

A couple of half crowns clicking together in your pocket, and you felt both rich and English.

They went not because there was anything wrong with them, but because the country they represented so well – an educated, self-disciplined and serious place - had vanished, along with the old-fashioned, solid wealth and hard work that stood behind them and made them feel so reassuringly heavy. What a strange thing it was in those days to go abroad and feel in your palm the featherweight, inflated, laughable coins of less happy lands, only fit for buying poor, thin beer. Now we have those here.

Share this article:

05 October 2014 12:46 AM

This is Peter Hitchens's Mail on Sunday columnHow odd it would be to actually watch Oxford beat Cambridge by a mile in the boat race, and then open the papers next morning and read that Cambridge had won.

Last week was a bit like that for me. I watched the Tory conference carefully. And then I read the papers, and it was all plain wrong.

Take this quotation, from a Tory document, describing the ‘key objectives’ of their planned new bill on ‘Human Rights’.

One of them is to ‘put the text of the original Human Rights convention into primary legislation’. In other words, the Tories plan to make Human Rights a permanent part of our constitution. Is that what you thought they were doing?

It goes on to say: ‘There is nothing wrong with that original document.’ Is that what you thought they thought? Because it is.

The only way to escape the ‘Human Rights’ curse is to abolish it entirely, and rely (as we did when we were truly free and independent) on our own well-tried laws, forged in centuries of constitutional battle.

Canada, which has its own homegrown ‘Charter Of Rights And Freedoms’, modelled on the European one, is just as entangled in liberal drivel as we are. It’s not where the Charter comes from that’s the problem. It’s what it is.

You have deliberately been given a wholly false impression of what is planned – and, alas, much of the media has joined in the deception.

There are other falsehoods. Perhaps the worst and most wounding for a British patriot is Mrs Theresa May’s plan to ban ‘extremists’ from the airwaves and the internet. What is an extremist? Why, anyone the Government says is one. I might be one. You might be one.

What joy this idea must have given the Chinese despots currently resisting peaceful demands for more freedom in Hong Kong.

I can just imagine the glee with which they will throw back any British protests at repression, by saying how much they admire Mrs May’s reintroduction of medieval tyranny into our penal code. For this disgraceful outburst, Mrs May was praised as a possible future premier by choirs of sycophants.

But then we must come to that great streak of snake-oil and hair gel, the Prime Minister’s speech in Birmingham on Wednesday. I confess I swore at the TV set several times, enraged by his sheer nerve.

His ostentatious wearing of a Help For Heroes wristband after needlessly prolonging the peril of British troops in Afghanistan was particularly repulsive to me.

I hope his endorsement did not harm that excellent charity too much, though I have never understood why wounded soldiers should need to rely upon charity for their care.

IT WAS full of what I will politely call terminological inexactitudes. Of these the greatest was his pretence that he hates being in coalition with Liberal Democrats. All the rest flowed from this falsehood.

Let me remind you of what he said on September 20, 2009, long before he was allegedly ‘forced’ into this arrangement: ‘On so many progressive issues, there is strong agreement between our parties.’ By ‘progressive’, he means left-wing.

The next greatest falsehood was his pretence that he fears Labour more than he fears Ukip. The opposite is true. His Blairite project would be quite safe under Labour.

Only a Ukip breakthrough offers the poor, betrayed British people any hope of real change. The others must lie, because they know their real aims are hateful to us.

No happy ending for story time

How sad to hear that BBC radio is ending its last children’s programme – because its audience is mostly made up of over-60s.

For me, the words ‘It’s a quarter to two’ and ‘Are you sitting comfortably?’, which began the old programme Listen With Mother, are still infused with magic. I actually did listen to it with my mother, and there were plenty of others who did the same.

We make a lot of fuss about how adults should read to children, but I’m not sure we really do very much about it. It’s difficult. Children are incredibly sensitive to the atmosphere around them, and our age is too noisy and frantic to listen to stories.

It only works if you can see the story unfolding in your head. And modern children face so many distractions – and have their imaginations hoovered out of their heads by TV and computer games at incredibly early ages.

And language gets cruder and coarser every year. I was enraptured when teachers read Conan Doyle’s great historical romances to us on dark afternoons, and John Masefield’s The Box Of Delights. But how many eight-year-olds can cope these days with their richly embroidered English?

A brave attempt to revive the lost art is being made in Oxford now, by the extraordinary new Story Museum, which should get more attention. It has a real wardrobe, through which you can reach a snowy forest, and many other wonders and surprises.

But above all it is devoted to the idea that children who know stories will grow up happier and richer in spirit than those who don’t.

My homebound train slowed, then halted meaninglessly in the middle of some post-industrial wasteland. Late again. In fact, at least a dozen trains were held up by about half an hour, on a major line.

This happens so often that I wouldn’t mention it, except that the delay was blamed on a mysterious ‘object’ on the line, which announcers were careful not to name.

My mind raced. What could it be that was so bad they couldn’t mention it? A dead sheep? A lavatory? A coffin? A Human Right?

By diligent enquiry, I found in the end that it was... a solitary plastic traffic cone. Instead of hooking it off the track with a pole, or jumping down and picking it up, or just letting trains biff it out of the way, now legally perilous, those in charge launched a major alert, as signals switched to red for miles around.

Of course they knew it was silly – that’s why they wouldn’t reveal what the object was. But this is the state of our country since the Thatcher and Major Governments allowed no-win-no-fee lawyers to operate – in the full knowledge of the misery and stupidity they had already brought to the USA. Next time I’ll ring the Cones Hotline – if it still exists.

The Prime Minister says he prefers pounds, pints, yards and miles to litres and metres. Perhaps he does, or perhaps he is just saying that because he knows it plays well with people like me.

If he really means it, then he can do something about it. For many years, the Government – and increasingly the BBC – have acted as if Parliament abolished our traditional measurements.

It never did. Nor was it ever discussed at a General Election. What’s more, these measures are still used in the USA, a successful and efficient country with which we do a lot of trade.

Yet schools and officials act as if feet and inches, yards and acres are antiquated and subversive, coldly refusing to use them. There’s no warrant for this. Mr Cameron has the power to stop it. Everyone in this country should know how many inches make a foot, and how many pounds there are in a stone.

Share this article:

20 March 2013 12:25 PM

While going through an old chest of drawers I recently came across an old twelve-sided threepenny bit. Most people don’t remember these coins, but to me they were once part of daily life. One of them would once have bought you a national newspaper or a very small chocolate bar. Technically, they were worth a little more than one of the decimal pennies (always known scornfully as ‘pee’) which were introduced during that year of revolution, 1971. It was a dead thing when I found it, long unused and though not actually tarnished, just a flat, matt yellowish shape of cheap base metal.

But it cheered me up in some undefinable way, so I put it in my pocket with all the other change and after a few days it had come to life again, and taken on a bit of sparkle and glow. This was how I remembered it in use. It made a great difference to its power to evoke – just as the sight of a main-line steam engine on a proper railway conjures up far more memories than a tootling tank engine shuffling about on a few miles of revived branch-line track.

It’s not a specially handsome coin, as the old half-crown was, and the pre-1939 shillings were. It would never have bought a Mars Bar, as the old sixpence used to do (Could you get a ‘Milky Way’ with it? You could certainly get a rather unsatisfactory confection called a ‘Punch’ bar , not to mention twelve four-for-a-penny chews - though it was no good offering the lady in the sweetshop a farthing for a single one of these chews, as the farthing ( a quarter of a penny) had gone out of circulation by then, though there were still quite a few about; nor usually a ha'penny ( half penny, for those unfortunate enough not to recall this coin) for two of them. It was four for a penny, and multiples thereof, or 'Clear off!').

It only existed as legal tender for fewer than 40 years, as it gradually replaced the old silver threepence, the despised ‘Joey’ which features so much in George Orwell’s long, heartfelt complaint about the hell of middle class poverty, ‘Keep the Aspidistra Flying’. The ‘Joey’ was a silver disc so small and thin that ( a bit like the modern, miserable Five Pee, or the American dime) it would stick to your fingertip and was worth so little that it was almost embarrassing to spend it, an admission that you were down to your last few pence.

Why did it cheer me up? Well, the usual thing, the awakening of pleasant memories of saving and spending such coins on small childhood pleasures, plus the warm, overwhelmingly British shape of it. I learned very early on in life that nobody, apart from the Swiss (whose silver pieces were comparable to our old ones in weight, detail and shine) , had a coinage that was as confidence-inspiring as ours. Foreign coins had holes in them, or were made of industrial grey metals so light that they seemed likely to blow away in the wind. And they were all boring decimals.

The very idea of a coin representing three of something, and which was at the same time a quarter of a shilling, was subversive of the boring, regulated decimal world beyond our shores, in which everyone counted on their toes, and nobody could divide anything by three, or (and this was even odder) wanted to divide anything by four, let alone eight, which of course real people do all the time. Athe equivakent of a penny in the Channel Island of Jersey was in those days something called 'Eight Doubles', pronounced 'doobles' , as I clearly remember, though Jerseymen in recent years have expressed baffled scepticism about this memory.

The only exception to this was the American Quarter Dollar, another lovely coin which defied the decimal logic of the US currency and suggested that the Americans, in their hearts weren’t wholly wedded to toe-counting as the supreme form of mathematics. Which of course they're not, bless them. Free people never are. In idaho a few weeks ago I rejoiced to see paint sold in gallons, meat sold by the pound and coffee sold in fluid ounces. And do you know, it wasn't backward at all?

The US Treasury also prints Two Dollar Bills, though these are quite hard to find (Ask at a bank if you are in the US. They sometimes have them. Some people regard them as unlucky). They fit into no proper mathematical sequence, toe-counting or advanced. You will only ever receive these in change at Monticello, Thomas Jefferson’s lovely, boyishly gadget-filled house in the Virginia Hills (depicted on the US nickel, the five cent coin). That is because they have a picture of Mr Jefferson on one side, and rather fine depiction of the Founding Fathers signing the Declaration of Independence on the other. It is in many ways the most interesting piece of paper money you will ever see (though those pyramids, eyes and strange Latin inscriptions on the single dollar bill always seem to me to attract less attention than they should).

It was only after my last portable typewriter eventually wore out, from too much frenzied hammering and from being dropped too often, that I realised that modern computer keyboards don’t provide fractions. This must be a deliberate decision. They do provide all kinds of wholly useless (to me) and mysterious (to me) keys, while oddly being quite unable to agree on where to put the now-essential ‘@‘ symbol, which on some foreign keyboards requires acrobatics to locate. I’m sorry, but 1/2 just doesn’t look like ‘half’ to me. There just isn’t any peaceful coexistence between decimals, and metric measures, and the old world of halves, quarters, thirds, and threepenny bits. And whenever I complain about this, angry decimalists and metricators rage spitefully at me, falsely accusing me of wanting to stamp out their dull, inhuman measures, when all want to do is to live and let live. I assume they accuse me of this fault, because in some Freudian way they project their desires on to me.

Share this article:

04 June 2012 3:21 PM

Back at my desk (I wasn’t that far away – funny that when I go on assignment readers always assume I’m on holiday, whereas when I go on holiday they assume I’m on assignment) I thought it was time for some conversation with readers. But before I forget, those who were interested in my reflections on Philip Larkin can find my review of the new Collected Poems in the American conservative magazine ‘National Review’ here.

I’d like to address some readers who told me that the early 1950s in Britain were not some sort of ‘Golden Age’. Well, let the record show that I have never said that they were. Not only that. I have repeatedly said that I have no such view. The past is in any case gone and irrecoverable. Even if we wished to return to it, we could not. We study it carefully, so as to understand our own times better, and also to avoid choosing – as our parents and grandparents did – the wrong future.

We also have the tedious allegation that people have always complained that the past was better than the present. Well a) that is not what I am saying and b) I don’t believe this is true of all times and c) what if, on some occasions, they are right to mourn the loss of good things in the past? Does that mean that their complaints are invalidated because others have mistakenly done so at other times? This is not serious debate. And grown-up people should steer clear of it.

So a belief in a ‘Golden Age’, and a desire to return to such an age, are not the argument. The argument is about whether we have lost anything valuable, and if so, whether we could then by thought and care have preserved it, and whether we might now or in the future, by thought and care, restore or recover it. And I would be pleased, if, *just for once*, one of these braying, repetitive and thoughtless critics actually responded rationally to the reply I shall now give.

I was born in 1951 and so of course did not directly experience the Coronation. I was in my pram at the time. Careful readers will have noted that I was referring not to my own experience but to the film of the Coronation which has just been reissued as a DVD. Like so many such films (I believe there’s a positive treasury of evocative footage of the era on the British Council website) it shows glimpses of a Britain now as vanished as the lost city of Atlantis. These glimpses are brief (they weren’t the purpose of the film) but they are very evocative for me as, when I did grow conscious of my surroundings, the people, cityscape and countryside of my youth were rather similar. The sight of that Britain preserved on colour film awakes many memories.

This particular Britain did not die in one night, but vanished slowly and in part. It survived in many ways until the end of the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s. Traces of it could be found in a few remote corners much later than that. I tend to think its death was marked by a series of apparently unconnected events – Winston Churchill’s funeral, the final disappearance of steam railway locomotives, the abolition of the old coinage, the burning off of the old town gas in great braziers in the streets at around the same time, and the feeling of despond and darkness that came after the Yom Kippur War and Ted Heath’s Three Day Week. Not coincidentally, the country was taking the Brussels yoke at the same time, ceding its sovereignty to what would become the EU.

What was different? Well, my book ‘the Abolition of Britain’ mentions many of these things, really a matter of the ways in which people thought and behaved, rather than measurable in material possessions and material living standards.

Even a book wasn’t really long enough to explain all the things which had changed, nor the how, nor the why, though I do recommend it to anyone who is interested. It is not the book my enemies have claimed it to be. So my article, with only a little space, sought to summarise them thus : “In 1953, criminals were afraid of the police, school pupils were under the thumb of teachers, couples stayed married till they died, we made the most of the things we used, hardly anyone lived off the State, our Parliament and courts made and maintained our laws, poor people were thin rather than fat, and the strongest drug around was aspirin. What is more, we loved our country and respected its traditions, laws and institutions.

Every educated person would have known the words that open the Coronation film, John of Gaunt’s dying speech from Shakespeare’s Richard II which ends ‘. . . this earth, this realm, this England’. “

I said nothing here about wife-beating, chilblains, smoking, homosexuality, hygiene, food quality or the death penalty – though most of these subjects are in fact tackled insome detail in ‘the Abolition of Britain’, which I do wish my critics would actually read, rather than thinking that they have read it when they haven’t (I can always tell).

Yet one contributor rages at me : ‘ The good old days? The police, teachers, parents, husbands, etc used to beat people up on a regular basis. Innocents hanged, I see there is still no mention of Sam Hallam. Sexual abuse in the home tolerated, "It's nothing to do with us!" Homosexuals imprisoned. Single parents, and their children, they had an older word for love child then, ostracised and made to feel ashamed. Backstreet abortions. People having to lie in court in order to get a divorce. Kids who failed the 11-plus condemned to be industry fodder.’

Let’s take this piece by piece. ‘The ‘good old days’ is his phrase, not mine. I never use it. Criminals now terrorise whole areas of our cities, unrestrained by any fear of the police. I am on record as saying that the police should be free to thump badly-behaved people within reasonable limits, because it would be simply silly to deny that this ever happened, or to deny that their authority rested to some extent on their freedom to do so. Anyone is welcome to argue about whether this is a good thing, but not by snorting away in a superior fashion about what a bad person I am for accepting this rather obvious truth. They should bear in mind that it is a choice. You can either have the police licensed to thump low-lifes, or you can have the low-lifes in charge. No utopia is available, in which the police are soppy and the bad people are well-behaved.

Teachers have ceded control of classrooms to children who refuse to listen or maintain order. Those who wish to learn are abandoned. To some extent, this is the result of the abolition of teachers’ freedom to inflict corporal punishment. There are, of course, several other reasons, but these are also connected with or national moral decline. Once again there is a choice here. Which do you want? Disorder, or the cane?

Violence and sexual abuse against children in the home, usually inflicted by step-parents is horribly common in the present day. The fate of children taken ‘into care’ is often appalling. I don’t know whether this abuse could be said to be ‘tolerated’ but it certainly happens under the modern dispensation. Whether it would be possible to quantify such abuse under the old regime and under the new, I do not know - but I am by no means sure that the ‘enlightened’ society of today would come out any better. The same is true of men beating women.

Of course wife-beating was a problem in the past. But now that we have all but abolished marriage, is such violence at an end? I rather think not. On the contrary, as Anthony Daniels has argued, in a society where fidelity is far from being the norm, jealous men are much readier to use violence to enforce it than they used to be. Given that children are so much better off in stable marriages, and that the outcome for women in this case is not that different (and may well be better for married women than unmarried ones – I await reliable facts) there isn’t even much of a dilemma.

I don’t know what the case of Sam Hallam has to do with this. There will never be a perfect world. Justice systems will always make mistakes. My own view is that they make more nowadays than they used to. The jury system has been unacceptably weakened, both by majority verdicts and by the abandoning of any qualification for jury service (this is explained at length in ‘The Abolition of Liberty’). It has also been weakened by fake conservative Home Secretaries such as Michael Howard, who abolished the right to silence, and by the post-Macpherson frenzy, when the double jeopardy rule was abandoned. The presumption of innocence, once quite strong in theory and practice, has now become a very weak force in practice.

Opponents of the death penalty claim to be worried about the execution of inncoents. they aren't really. It is just a rhetorical point. Innocents die for all kinds of reasons (millions in abortions, to which the anti-execution lobby seem to have no ojection) Many innocents are murdered, far more than used to be in the days ogf the death penalty, sometimes by convicted murderers who have been released. Convicted killers go free after a few years in non-punitive prisons. Innocents are also shot by armed police. Homicide and homicidal violence (which would have resulted in hundreds of deaths a year if we still had the hospitals of 1964) have increased enormously, as has the carrying of lethal weapons by criminals.

Meanwhile, in the brave new world preferred by my critics, people are arrested and fined for expressing unfashionable opinions about homosexuality, and often face harassment at work for expressing conservative or Christian opinions, events unthinkable in 1953. By the way, I obviously need to state here, yet again, that I fully support (and am countless times on record as supporting) the 1967 Sexual Offences Act which ensured that homosexual acts between consenting adults were no longer subject to criminal prosecution. I have to say this because my opponents either have not troubled to find out my views, or hope that others will not know my real position.

My views on the revolution in the treatment of unmarried mothers are set out fully in ‘The Abolition of Britain’, along with an interesting history of how this change came about. I am happy to discuss this with anyone who is really interested, but the author of the above caricature of recent history may not be terribly interested in the facts.

Children deprived of the opportunity of selection into high-quality free state education moulder, rot and despair in bog standard comprehensive schools far worse than any Secondary Modern. The best guarantee of racial harmony is a strong fellow-feeling brought about by full integration of migrants. While disgusting racialist signs in windows have disappeared we have instead whole cities in which large numbers of citizens have no converse with those of different ethnic origins, and often do not even speak the same language. Is this progress? Or the exchange of one evil for another? I don’t like either of them. I want tightly-controlled immigration, an end to multiculturalism and strong efforts to ensure true integration. That is one lesson we can certainly learn from the past 60 years.

I also know that there was a serious increase in crime after (and as a result of) the huge social dislocation of the 1939-45 war. That was the reason for the making of the famous film ‘The Blue Lamp’ I know that there was delinquent behaviour before 1939. I don’t believe that the past was a paradise.

Here’s what I do think. That there is no reason to assume that our material advances, which are undoubted, came at the necessary and unavoidable cost of a huge moral decay. I cannot see why we could not have come to eat better, to be better housed, to be better-travelled than we were in 1953. Just because the two things happened at the same time, does not mean that one was the cause of the other. But some of our current woes can certainly be traced to the dismantling of moral barriers, against selfishness and extravagance of all kinds.

Our period of moral decline has also, as I tried to point out, been a period of economically moral decline, in which we have ceased to make what we use, and have become a debtor nation, unable to supply our own needs through our own work and skills, and living on morally dubious funny money. I think our moral, social and cultural decay has something to do with it. This interesting article by Larry Elliott in Monday’s ‘Guardian’ must be sobering for believers in ‘progress’. Read it here.

In the same paper, the fascinating obituary of the brilliant aeronautical engineer, Sir James Hamilton, here contains the following passage, discomfiting to believers in educational ‘progress’: ‘In 1973 Hamilton [who had attended a Scottish Academy (Penicuik Academy, now vanished), the north-of-the-border equivalent of a grammar school] moved to the Cabinet Office as deputy secretary, serving under prime ministers Edward Heath and Harold Wilson. From 1976 to 1983 he headed the Department of Education and Science as permanent secretary. Both during this period and later in the Margaret Thatcher years, he became seriously concerned at what he termed "extremely mediocre" education standards in science and engineering at some universities and technical colleges.’

A couple of other points. The petulant ire of tobacco smokers against attempts to discourage their smelly and dangerous habit sometimes leads them into hysteria, and so into laughable category errors. Banning smoking from pubs really isn’t the equivalent of Stalin’s 1937 purge, or even remotely comparable with anything the KGB ever did. The freedom to damage your own health, and to bereave and profoundly distress your close family in a long-drawn-out and painful way, is also not comparable to the freedoms of speech, thought and assembly, which are precious national possessions.

Another misunderstanding comes from someone who suspects that the centralised NCA may be re effective against cannabis than our decentralised police forces. It is not a lack of manpower or organisation that is behind the British state’s failure to interdict drug possession. It is a deliberate lack of will. There is absolutely no reason to suppose, in any case, that nationalised law enforcement would be any more efficient or effective than non-nationalised law-enforcement.

I am wary of comparisons between this country and Asian countries which have ferocious laws against drug smuggling. I know little of these societies or their laws, suspect that drug abuse is widespread in them, and think the death penalty should be reserved for heinous murder and possibly treason, and then only in countries with the presumption of innocence, proper (unanimous verdict) jury trial and a free press. I am also very much against the detention of prisoners, whether convicted or unconvicted, in squalid, ill-supervised and overcrowded conditions.

Maybe later in the week I might discuss the claims of ‘Republicanism’ versus ‘Monarchy’ , and of course of that strange form of delusion known as ‘democracy’, under which people repeatedly vote for their own cynical subjugation by organised gangs of habitual fraudsters, and pretend they can choose their government.

31 January 2008 5:53 PM

I try to read '1984' and 'Brave New World' every two years or so, and each time I do, they yield up new meanings. But I had not opened the late (alas) Malcolm Bradbury's extraordinary novel for some time, and had lost my own copy. Then, on the very day that I decided to seek it out again, I found it in a second-hand bookshop (these days much the best place to find interesting books), immediately began to read and could not stop.

It is an astonishing work of description and of prophecy. The plateglass university world of the early 1970s, in which I lived, is recalled with relentless accuracy - the architecture, the language, the mannerisms, the beliefs, the way it felt. It transports me straight back to York in the days of Ted Heath, and would -I think - do the same for those who experienced Sussex, East Anglia, Warwick and Lancaster around the same time.

But it is much better even than that. It sees that world as it was then, but as I would see it now rather than as I viewed it at the time. Suddenly, the real character of what I heedlessly watched and did is explained with cold and unsympathetic clarity. And it repeats a curious experience I had when I revisited the York campus in the mid-1980s, more than a decade after I had graduated. Back in 1970, the prefab buildings around their plastic-bottomed lake, with their relaxed sexual (and other) rules and the almost total absence of anything old or dark or stern, had been a sort of 'progressive' oasis in a Britain that was still remarkably old-fashioned. Many of the changes - the abolition of grammar schools, the mergers of police forces, entry to the Common Market, destruction of the old counties and boroughs, compulsory metrication, colour TV, cloning of high streets and standardisation of pubs - had either not yet happened or were only just beginning to bite.

Nearly 20 years later, the university had barely changed at all (it even smelled the same) but the rest of Britain had become much more like the York campus. Bright, new, cuboid buildings had replaced old, shadowy, classical and Gothic ones, informal eating had replaced formal meals, swearwords had become common in conversation, clothes were invariably casual, the background music was almost always rock rather than classical, and attitudes towards sex and drugs were relaxed.

I still remember a rather symbolic winter week in early 1971, when Britain simultaneously replaced the old town gas, (made from coal) and got rid of its ancient pounds, shillings and pence coinage, switching to a boring decimal system. The old gas had to be burned out of the mains, and strange devices, a bit like Armada beacons, were set up in the drear brick back streets of York, where the old coal gas flared through the drizzly night, turning the metal of the burners red hot. It was as if they were holding a funeral for the Industrial Revolution.

The following morning was Decimal Day, when we all had to begin to use the funny coins that everyone called pee, or possibly 'pence', and never 'pennies' - because we all knew that a penny was a large disc of worn copper, with a seated Britannia on one side - with the date just beneath her - and a King (or Queen’s) head on the other. These old pennies placed history in our pockets, because many of them were a hundred years old, often polished so smooth by your forebears that you could hardly read them, and a typical handful would bear the heads of the older Victoria, Edward VII, George V and George VI, each with the full Latin inscription (D.G. Omn Brit, Fid Def) giving their titles as monarchs by the Grace of God of all Britain, Defender of the Faith. The older ones were also 'Ind Imp’, emperors or empresses of India. On a lucky day you might also get a 'Bun Penny', with the lovely image of the younger, girlish Victoria, her hair in a bun (hence the name, though you could also once have bought a currant bun for one of these, and in Victoria's days half a dozen buns). These were replaced by dull, tiresome 'new pennies' which looked like American cents, and useless half new pennies, only introduced in an unsuccessful attempt to pretend that the new money wouldn't stoke up inflation by 'rounding up'. These stuck to your fingers and, while useful as emergency screwdrivers, never gained anyone's affection. Also, inflation duly made them worthless with amazing speed.

We also waved goodbye to the half-crown, that lovely coin decorated with a specially elegant version of the Royal Arms, which (in its older versions) contained so much silver that if you rubbed it on your sleeve it would shine like jewellery, and made any child feel rich when he had it in his pocket.

Somebody said on this blog the other day that most people wouldn't know what I meant when I talked of a 'cultural; revolution'. Well, perhaps not. But I cannot please everybody. The phrase is a reference to the collective destructive madness encouraged by Mao in China in 1967. But, oddly enough, I think quite a lot of people know, instinctively, what it means when they hear it applied to Britain. They know that this country, between about 1962 and about 1975, underwent so many changes that it amounted to a revolution, and they don't recall being asked if they wanted them. Malcolm Bradbury's book gives some idea of what part of it was like.

When 'The History Man' opens in October 1972 in the fictional southern English town of Watermouth, this revolution is still only half-complete. But that is not the fault of Howard Kirk, its central character (played by Anthony Sher in a questionable BBC TV version of the story in 1980). He is hurrying things along as fast as he can. Kirk, and his wife Barbara, are both grammar school products who might in the current egalitarian age never have made it into the middle class because their hopes would have been destroyed by bad education.

"Here were two people who had grown up, though in two different Northern towns, one in Yorkshire and one in Lancashire, in the same class and value background. That background was one of vestigial Christianity and inherited social deference...they came, both of them, from well-conducted and more or less puritanical home, located socially inn that perplexing borderland between working-class anarchism and lower-middle-class conformity. These were Chapel families, with high ethical standards and low social expectations".

The book is mostly the story , sparely written and mockingly cruel to most of its characters, of a few short days, of a horrible party, of the Kirks' own infidelities and especially of Howard's disgraceful abuse of his position, both as sexual predator and merciless, troublemaking commissar and thought policeman. It contains a devastating description of the preoccupations of the left-wing classes, right down to the organic food (it is amazing that anyone had heard of it back then, but they had) which still strikes home more than 30 years after it was written. But it also explores the personal history of the Kirks, their awakening into the monsters they have become, triggered by Barbara's brief affair. Anyone who thinks that the sexual revolution can be separated from the social and political one should read this account. The new politics are all about licensing selfishness, in bed and out of it.

All the morally good people in the book are hopeless, eccentric and eventually defeated. Howard's old friend Henry Beamish, a luckless man to whom accidents happen quite mercilessly, has the best speech in the book, and the finest moment (which you can discover for yourselves). The speech comes after Howard Kirk gives his Marxist-Freudian view of the problems in Henry's marriage.

"God", says Henry "The Kirk consultancy parlour. I'm out of all that now...I've stopped wanting to stand up and forge history with my penis. And I'm rather sick of the great secular dominion of liberation and equality we were on about then, which reduces, when you think about it, to putting system over people and producing large piles of corpses...I don't want to blame anyone now, or take anything off anyone. The only thing that matters for me is attachment to other knowable people, and the gentleness of relationship."

He gets this sneering reply from Howard Kirk. "Well, that's what we all want, isn't it? ...sweetness and light and plenty of Mozart. But we can't have it..."

Actually Howard Kirk wants nothing of the sort. He feeds on rancour. He sells personal gossip in return for sexual favours. He contrives to get a controversial geneticist invited to the university, in the justified hope that the student left will shout him down. He corrupts and debauches Miss Callendar, an English lecturer who at the start of the book seems to be his match, but collapses when taken by storm. This sad moment is the most miserable in the book, and actually unbelievable, because Miss Callendar has up till then been strongly armoured against Howard Kirk's wiles. But while it is personally incredible, it is politically true. Conservative forces in the civilised West have almost always caved in to attacks from the radical left.

But perhaps even worse is Kirk's vendetta against one of his students, George Carmody, destroyed because he refuses to follow Kirk's left-wing approach to the subject. The abuse of power here is described in a way that is terrifying and again, superficially, rather unbelievable. Could anyone, claiming to be a radical fighting for freedom, possibly behave like this? The answer, as we have seen across the university campuses of the western world for the last 30 years, is that yes, they can and do. Nor is it only academics who have adopted this merciless intolerance. Carmody tries, rather resourcefully, to defend himself. But he is relying on the world continuing to enforce the moral opinions it pretends to hold.

This is why I call the book prophetic. In 1972 or 1975, civilised people might have imagined that the Howard Kirks were a brief, unpleasant fashion isolated on a few plate-glass university campuses and bound to be defeated by superior reason and the gigantic forces of goodness. The Yom Kippur war of 1973, and the darkening effect that had after the frivolous bright lights and febrile prosperity of the 1960s (which in my view lasted from 1963 to 1973, in spirit), did at one stage seem to have put an end to the radical dream.

But it has not been so. Lacking any rallying point, and any belief beyond poor Henry Beamish's desire to cultivate a peaceful, kindly garden, the forces of civilisation have stepped back, and back, and back again, until there is very little left and there will soon be even less. I am very grateful to the late Auberon Waugh for relentlessly publicising this extraordinary book, amongst all his other insights. I'd like to pass on the favour. Please read it.

Share this article:

06 March 2007 1:00 PM

A warm thank you to Rolf Norfolk, for supporting the old duodecimal system, adaptable, flexible, friendlier to human beings (who like to divide by threes from time to time) than to machines. Decimal currency and metric measurements are a step downwards, crude, toe-counting things designed for an ill-educated population. In my memory, all British people (who had chanted the old measures in class till they were engraved on their hearts) had no trouble with either the old money or with stones, pounds and ounces.

What's interesting about these allegedly more efficient systems is that the younger generations, educated in nothing else, are so bad at using them. You're much more likely to get short change or short measure now than you ever were before. And by accident, not because someone is trying to swindle you. That's because almost anyone who's ever handled a pound of meat or a half-pound of butter or a pint of milk knows what it looks and feels like, whereas a gram is a meaningless thing. Also, you don't learn the decimal system by heart - how could you? So if the calculator or the electronic till are wrong, you cannot do the mental arithmetic to check it. If you have learned your pounds, shillings and pence by heart, you never need a calculator. And I know hardly anyone who buys petrol by the litre (though we all used to buy it by the gallon). We buy it by the pound (sterling) because most of us haven't a clue what a litre is. It's such a useless measure for anything. One litre of petrol would barely get you home. No decent wine, as I often point out, is sold by the litre. And only Bavarians drink litres of beer.

It is true that inflation - which the new currency disguised, would have wrecked the old 240 penny to the pound system anyway. We would have had to revalue the pound about ten times over to make it work, by the time Ted Heath and Harold Wilson had finished. But if people realised - as we pre-decimal ones do - how bad inflation has actually been, they would be far more discontented than they are.

You see, when I am charged 50 pence for something I think of what I could once buy for a ten-shilling note (and how wealthy I used to feel with one of those). And the new two-pound coin (which is actually quite attractive) now buys about as much as a silver half crown once did, and feels the same in the pocket. Except, it took 16 half-crowns to make two pounds.

People think that debauchery of the currency is normal - and it is in many foreign countries. But it used not to be here. If you read Robert Graves's haunting historical novel 'Wife to Mr Milton', about the Civil War period and published in 1949, you'll find that Graves notes in the introduction that the prices of many goods in 1949 are still recognisably similar to their prices in 1649.

That break in continuity, that cutting off from the language and habits of our forebears over centuries, is a horrible characteristic of the last 50 years. Children do not understand things that their parents used to see as normal, and are often taught in schools to deride or ignore them. Parents are asked by their children why they still use 'American' measures when they refer to inches and feet. These children genuinely do not know that these are the ancient customary measures of these islands, inherited by the USA from us, polished by centuries of use and familiarity.

I sometimes wonder if this isn't part of the purpose of the metric fanatics, to place barriers of confusion and misunderstanding between the generations. I always enjoy it when they fail.

I usually get up very early on Saturdays, and listen, half-stunned by sleep, to a BBC Radio 4 programme called 'The Living World'. Those who take part appear to have been ordered by the BBC's metric commissars to use nothing but metric measurements, but the nice country and seafaring people who are interviewed frequently lapse into yards, feet and inches. Nobody will ever love the awkward, angular, inhuman, inconvenient metric measures concocted (on the basis of a false measurement of the earth's circumference) by a committee of French scientists.

I noticed the other day how many references to yards, inches, feet and miles there are in 'Alice in Wonderland' and 'Alice Though the Looking Glass'. Assuming these ingenious, endlessly clever books are allowed to survive, or that anyone still bothers to read them

twenty years hence, will these references be converted to metres, centimetres and kilometres? I suspect some metric fanatic is even now going through Shakespeare and the Bible, converting away. But what will they do about Robert Frost's great poem "Stopping by woods on a snowy evening"? Will the final lines be converted to read "The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but I have promises to keep, and kilometres to go before I sleep, and kilometres to go before I sleep'? Lacks something, doesn't it? What it lacks is poetry. But what kind of silly person wants poetry in our daily lives? The very idea.